Blasphemy as a National Security Threat
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Imran Firasat
Spain has begun deportation proceedings against Imran Firasat, a Christian refugee from Pakistan, for making a documentary about Mohammed and thereby threatening the national security of Spain. If Firasat is deported back to Pakistan, he will face the death penalty proving that it’s a short step from the Spanish Inquisition to the Pakistani Inquisition.
But it’s not really about the deaths, if it were then the United States wouldn’t be senselessly squandering the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan to avoid offending the natives. It’s not the death of men that our leaders are worried about, but the death of stability.
Knowing that a hundred men will die today in car accidents does not alarm anyone, but knowing that somewhere a dozen men might die in a bomb explosion, anywhere and at any time, can bring a nations to its knees. That is the difference between predictable and unpredictable death. Predictable death makes it possible for most everyone to go about doing what they normally do. Unpredictable death however erodes daily order.
Blasphemy makes terrorism seem predictable. It delivers that false sense of control that is at the root of Stockholm Syndrome, the seductive illusion that the thug can be reasoned with and that we can restore control over our perilous environment by accepting responsibility for the enemy’s violence. If we meet a set of conditions then we will have peace. And what kind of lunatic wouldn’t want peace? The kind who needs to be deported or locked up in the name of peace.
When an entire country goes Stockholm then it is no longer interested in winning the war, only in surviving the peace. In a Stockholm country, national security consists of locking up anyone who can be blamed for sabotaging the peacemaking. The less peace there is, the more the peacemakers go on the hunt for “extremists” who are to blame for the lack of it. The more their vision of a better world fails, the more stern measures they must take against their own people. Peace is always one more denunciation of extremism away.
The same countries whose leaders have spent a century and a half blathering incessantly about a truly progressive order under international law have shown no ability to cope with the old-fashioned kind of war. They can quote verbatim the laws of war, but understand poorly that war makes its own laws. War’s simplest law is that you pick a pretext, any popular pretext, make your demands and then go on the attack. If the other side is foolish enough to meet your demands, then it has shown its weakness and must be attacked again and again.
Muslims have restored blasphemy prosecutions to the United States and Europe through violence. Like Khrushchev banging his shoe on the United Nations delegate desk, they did their best to convince the rest of the world that they were violently irrational and liable to do all sorts of things if their demands weren’t met. And their demands were met. Rather than going medieval on their asses, the civilized world instead went medieval on anyone who offended the medieval cult of Islam.
Muslim blasphemy, like the ghetto hood’s respect is an assertion of supremacy by identity. It isn’t a grievance, it’s a right of violence, and if you give into it, then you accept the inferior status that comes from being weak in a system where might makes right and killing people, or threatening to, is what makes one man better than another.
Trapped in a long-term war, our leaders are looking for ways of making the conflict more manageable. If they can’t win the war, they can at least limit the number of attacks. It’s not the open book kind of appeasement, but the double book kind. The open book is still patriotic, but the second book in the bottom drawer is running payments to the terrorists and finding ways to accommodate them. And anyone who runs afoul of the second book, also runs afoul of national security.
War often compromises freedoms, but it rarely compromises the freedom to hurt the enemy’s feelings. But this is a different sort of war. A war with no enemies and no hope of victory. A war whose only hope is that one day our enemies will become better people and stop trying to kill us. Our enemies are fighting to take away our freedoms and we are fighting to take away our own freedoms in the hopes that if we give up some of them to the enemy, he will settle for them and give up on the rest.
In this sort of war, blasphemy is a serious national security threat, not because it truly is, but because our leaders desperately need their Stockholm control points of appeasement, they need to believe that if they crack down on Koran burnings then they can reduce the fighting by 5 percent or 8 percent and that gives them hope that they can one day reduce it by 100 percent.
The actual numbers don’t matter. On the month after Bubba the Love Sponge did not burn the Koran, 50 percent more Americans died in Afghanistan, but the statisticians can always argue that if he had burned it, then 75 percent more or 100 percent more would have died. Islam runs on magical thinking and any effort to appease it must also embrace that same medieval magical thinking. Hoping that blasphemy prosecutions will reduce violence, is psychologically less of a strain than accepting that nothing will, that there is no magic bullet, only regular bullets.
The sort of men who deport filmmakers, when they aren’t locking them up, and treat the stunts of shock jocks as a matter of national security, fail to understand that they are not fighting some vague notion of “extremism” which is fed by “extreme” language and actions, but an organized ideology whose goal is not merely preventing Bubba the Love Sponge from burning the Koran, but compelling the Mayor of Tampa and the American commander in Afghanistan to compel Bubba not to burn a Koran.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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the americans and the rest of the world, instead of fearing the arabs for talking smack about muhamed, they should fear Hashem the G-d of all peoples when they promote gay marrage and immorality. Hes the one that is pounding america with violent storms and dissabling the "most powerful country on earth" all because of their sick ways. the arabs kill homosexuals and blasphimers. israel should do the same.
Funny how the areas in NYC most devastated by hurricane Sandy included most of the areas that vote Republican in national elections.
Funny how the areas in NYC most devastated by hurricane Sandy included most of the areas that vote Republican in national elections.
"proposed to burn a Koran,".
The guy who wanted to burn the Koran — and did — is a nutcase named Terry Jones. He wanted to burn a Talmud, too — because according to Jones we Jews were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
"Muslims have restored blasphemy prosecutions to the United States and Europe through violence."
There hasn't been a blasphemy prosecution anywhere in the US since the 1920s, and in the 1950s the US Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional.
I thought that the JP had higher standards for factual content.
"proposed to burn a Koran,".
The guy who wanted to burn the Koran — and did — is a nutcase named Terry Jones. He wanted to burn a Talmud, too — because according to Jones we Jews were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
"Muslims have restored blasphemy prosecutions to the United States and Europe through violence."
There hasn't been a blasphemy prosecution anywhere in the US since the 1920s, and in the 1950s the US Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional.
I thought that the JP had higher standards for factual content.
I liked Jones better when he was with Monty Python
I liked Jones better when he was with Monty Python
He's saying that we are effectively using such laws now, even if we don't call it blasphemy persecution.
He brings no evidence for such. Although frankly I think Jones should be confined in a mental institution.
"The United States has a man sitting in prison for making another blasphemous movie, which the government spent weeks blaming for worldwide attacks on American embassies. And he isn’t the first man persecuted or prosecuted for offending Islam.""When Bubba the Love Sponge, a Tampa DJ, proposed to burn a Koran, the commander of the Afghanistan war contacted his girlfriend (who would later be stalked by Petraeus’ girlfriend) to contact the Mayor of Tampa to keep Bubba from burning a Koran. Instead of explaining how the American system works to the Lebanese temptress and her four-star general, the mayor wrote back that the city was working on it."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/19/bubba_the_love_sponge He's talking about a different person. And people should be able to say they want to burn the Talmud or the Koran. And if they want to, the government should not stop them from doing so.
When a country is at war — and remember we are still in the GWOT — liberties are restricted when expressing those liberties damages the war effort.
Were we in the middle of WW1 or WW2, we would not be having this discussion.
Sure we restrict freedoms. This makes sense to the extent of wiretapping suspected terrorists, for instance, but that often gets liberals up in arms. I do not think they punished Americans for anti-German speech in WWI or II (in fact, there were attacks in the first-which I am not justifying.) There is no reason our freedom should be restricted in order to appease those who threaten us, and the author's point is that the illusion that this will work is dangerous. Furthermore, where does it end? At WWI and II, it was clear when we won; the war on terrorism is ongoing, and we cannot just say we will live indefinitely in fear of offending Islam. If we do, they've won.
" wiretapping suspected terrorists, for instance, but that often gets liberals up in arms"
Never got me up in arms. There has been provision for this in the law for over 30 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act
"At WWI and II, it was clear when we won; the war on terrorism is ongoing"
You are sounding like the ultra-lefties on dailykos!